Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Suppression Of Truth (part 4)

What is the end of
this becoming foolish and its expression of foolish statements? Paul
writes that the ones who did not glorify the Creator God, nor give Him thanks,
but became futile in their thoughts with darkened hearts, who claimed to be
wise but instead became fools, “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for an
image resembling mortal human beings or birds or four-footed animals or
reptiles” (Romans 1:23).

What Adam and Eve accomplished
was indeed the beginning of idolatry, and it began with self-worship, along
with a complete disregard of their God and a forgetfulness of the
Creator. A forgotten Creator, together with self-worship, can be seen when
Eve gives birth to a son and declares herself to have been able to create a
man. With that, man, rather than continuing to comprehend himself as the
steward of life, now looked at himself as being able to bring forth life---as
god-like.

There is an
implication that once the Creator God is shoved to the side and replaced by
another creator, then the fact that there was an act of creation (along with an
associated gifting of responsibilities) by that Creator falls quickly from the
mind. Having forgotten their Creator, and no longer bearing in mind that
they were part of a good created order, Adam and Eve (and those to whom they
gave birth) could look around them, observing the entire order of nature, and
surmise that the animals that they saw had brought themselves into existence, that
they could also pro-create and generate life, and that they were therefore
worthy of worship as well. So began the interminable fall into the
practice of idolatry that has gripped mankind from the very beginning. The
Scriptures seem to insist that it is only the grace of the covenant God of Israel
that enables one to break free from the ingrained tendency to idolatry, so as
to be able to see the Creator in His glory, and in doing so, seek to honor and
give worship to Him.

With mankind having
made its nearly irrevocable fall into idolatry, worshiping that which is not the
Creator God, and thereby deciding for themselves that there is no god beyond
himself and that to which he ascribes divinity, Paul continues his potential
reflection on the creation story and insists that “God gave them over in the
desires of their hearts to impurity, to dishonor their bodies among themselves”
(Romans 1:24).

The Creator God was
to be honored by mankind’s stewardship of His good creation, but man, as can be
observed from the fall and all that followed, had and has an altogether
different plan. It becomes patently clear from Genesis that the serpent merely
simply seized upon the desire of the human heart to honor only self, and Paul,
because of his constant assertion that the God of Israel is ultimately in
control of all things, describes this as the Creator God giving humanity over
to the desires of the heart.

With this self-honor,
in truth, the opposite transpired. With this self-honor, impurity imposed
itself into the world. With this self-honor came dishonor. That
dishonor, resulting from the rejection of their God’s plan for them, manifested
itself in death. The blame for this does not lie with the serpent, but
with mankind alone, who alone was created as the divine image for the cosmos. This dishonor came at their own hands, as
humanity is said to have engaged in the process of dishonoring their bodies
through their own decisions and actions---doing so among themselves. What
had been made in perfection and for life was now subject to the dishonor of
death, far removed from the God-glorifying honor of the Creator, which is the
purpose for which they had been created.